editorNPR Digital Services RSS Generator 0.94Michelle Trudeau began her radio career in 1981, filing stories for NPR from Beijing and Shanghai, China, where she and her husband lived for two years. She began working as a science reporter and producer for NPR's Science Desk since 1982. Trudeau's news reports and feature stories, which cover the areas of human behavior, child development, the brain sciences, and mental health, air on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered . Trudeau has been the recipient of more than twenty media broadcasting awards for her radio reporting, from such professional organizations as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Casey Journalism Center, the American Psychiatric Association, World Hunger, the Los Angeles Press Club, the American Psychological Association, and the National Mental Health Association. Trudeau is a graduate of Stanford University. While at Stanford, she studied primate behavior and conducted field research with Dr. Jane Goodall at the Gombe StreamNPR Digital Services RSS Generator 0.94Michelle TrudeauTue, 17 Jan 2017 13:33:14 +0000Michelle Trudeauhttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org
Michelle TrudeauWhen Samantha Deffler was young, her mother would often call her by her siblings' names — even the dog's name. "Rebecca, Jesse, Molly, Tucker, Samantha," she says. A lot of people mix up children's names or friends' names, but Deffler is a cognitive scientist at Rollins College , in Winter Park, Fla., and she wanted to find out why it happens. So she did a survey of 1,700 men and women of different ages, and she found that naming mistakes are very common. Most everyone sometimes mixes up the names of family and friends. Her findings were published in the journal Memory When The Brain Scrambles Names, It's Because You Love Themhttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/when-brain-scrambles-names-its-because-you-love-them
99325 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 16 Jan 2017 09:58:00 +0000When The Brain Scrambles Names, It's Because You Love ThemMichelle TrudeauFour years ago, Angela Stimpson agreed to donate a kidney to a complete stranger. "The only thing I knew about my recipient was that she was a female and she lived in Bakersfield, Calif.," Stimpson says. It was a true act of altruism — Stimpson risked pain and suffering to help another. So why did she do it? It involved major surgery, her donation was anonymous, and she wasn't paid. "At that time in my life, I was 42 years old. I was single, I had no children," Stimpson says. "I loved my life, but I would often question what my purpose is." When she read about the desperate need for kidneys, Stimpson, a graphic artist who lives in Albany, N.Y., says she found her purpose. She now blogs about her experience and encourages others to become donors. People like Stimpson are "extraordinary altruists," according to Abigail Marsh . She's an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University and one of the country's leading researchers into altruism. Marsh herself was the beneficiaryThe Biology Of Altruism: Good Deeds May Be Rooted In The Brainhttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/biology-altruism-good-deeds-may-be-rooted-brain
64544 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 22 Sep 2014 07:32:00 +0000The Biology Of Altruism: Good Deeds May Be Rooted In The BrainMichelle Trudeau"The lion and calf shall lie down together," Woody Allen once wrote, "but the calf won't get much sleep." That's pretty much the connection between stress and sleep, researchers say, and NPR's own numbers suggest the same thing. In our recent poll on stress in America, conducted in conjunction with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, about 70 percent of those who reported experiencing a great deal of stress in the previous month also said they had trouble sleeping. "Under stressful circumstances, and when people are haunted by life, they cannot sleep very well," says the University of Pittsburgh's Martica Hall . And no wonder. When you're feeling stressed, Hall says, your body marshals its famous fight-or-flight response. Stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenalin, are pumped out, your heart rate goes up, sugar is released into the blood, and more blood is sent to your brain and muscles. Hall says it's really hard to stay asleep through allSkimping On Sleep Can Stress Body And Brainhttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/skimping-sleep-can-stress-body-and-brain
61451 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgThu, 17 Jul 2014 07:31:00 +0000Skimping On Sleep Can Stress Body And BrainMichelle Trudeauhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMaCtapBduU Ever wonder why children can so easily figure out how to work the TV remote? Or why they "totally get" apps on your smartphone faster than you? It turns out that young children may be more open-minded than adults when it comes to solving problems. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have found that 4- and 5-year-olds are smarter than college students when it comes to figuring out how toys and gadgets work. Psychologist Alison Gopnik led the study along with her colleague Christopher Lucas from the University of Edinburgh. They wanted to find out what goes on in children's brains that allows them to learn so much so quickly. So they recruited over 100 preschoolers — 4- and 5-year-old boys and girls — and brought them into the lab. The kids had to figure out how to turn on a music box that could be activated by placing clay shapes either individually or in combination on top of the box. After being shown a whole series ofPreschoolers Outsmart College Students In Figuring Out Gadgetshttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/preschoolers-outsmart-college-students-figuring-out-gadgets
60585 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 30 Jun 2014 07:26:00 +0000Preschoolers Outsmart College Students In Figuring Out GadgetsMichelle TrudeauRemember that famous line in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise, "You had me at 'hello' "? Well it turns out there is some scientific evidence to back this up. People use voices to instantly judge people, researchers say. "From the first word you hear a person speak, you start to form this impression of the person's personality, says Phil McAleer , a psychologist at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, who led the study . In his experiment , McAleer recorded 64 people, men and women, from Glasgow, reading a paragraph that included the word "hello." He then extracted all the hellos and got 320 participants to listen to the different voices and rate them on 10 different personality traits, such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, confidence, dominance and warmth. What he found was that the participants largely agreed on which voice matched which personality trait. One male voice was overwhelmingly voted the least trustworthy, "the sort of guy you'd want toYou Had Me At Hello: The Science Behind First Impressionshttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/you-had-me-hello-science-behind-first-impressions
57811 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 05 May 2014 07:39:00 +0000You Had Me At Hello: The Science Behind First ImpressionsMichelle TrudeauKatharine Hepburn had it. So did playwright Eugene O'Neill and Sen. Robert Byrd. Essential tremor is a condition that causes involuntary shaking. While it usually develops in middle age, it can start much earlier. Shari Finsilver was aware of her hands shaking as a child. "When I was about 11 years old, I noticed in art class that I was never able to draw a straight line," she says. "I really didn't know why. I just thought it was odd. I just thought it was me." By age 13, the shaking in her hands was getting worse, but she kept it a secret. She did everything she could to hide it from her family, her teachers and her friends. By the time she was 19, Finsilver could no longer mask it. She remembers sitting at a large family holiday dinner with her mother across the table. She lifted a spoon to her mouth and her hand was shaking badly. "Suddenly the spoon went flying across the table," she says. "I can still remember the look on my mother's face. It was complete horror." Terrified thatInvoluntary Shaking Can Be Caused By Essential Tremorshttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/involuntary-shaking-could-be-caused-essential-tremors
56415 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 07 Apr 2014 07:33:00 +0000Involuntary Shaking Can Be Caused By Essential TremorsMichelle TrudeauMost research on memory loss in the elderly focuses on dementia, Alzheimer's disease or other brain diseases. But neuroscientist Emily Rogalski from Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine knew there is great variation in how good memory is in older people. Most have memory loss to varying degrees, but some have strong memories, even well into old age. Rogalski wanted to know just how good. So she began recruiting volunteers age 80 and up from the Chicago area to test their memories. The study appeared in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society . The volunteers came into Rogalski's memory lab and were given a barrage of tests. Rogalski says she told the participants: "We want individuals who are over age 80 to perform on memory tests like 50- to 60-year-olds, or better." Participants had to memorize a list of random words and recall the words some time later. Or they listened to stories and were later tested on the many small details in them. "TheInside The Brains Of People Over 80 With Exceptional Memoryhttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/inside-brains-people-over-80-exceptional-memory
39325 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 15 Apr 2013 07:05:00 +0000Inside The Brains Of People Over 80 With Exceptional MemoryMichelle TrudeauMiranda Kelly, a 14-year-old from Sykesville, Md., says she's been sleepwalking since she was 6 or 7. The first time, she says, "I woke up on the couch on a school day. And I'd gone to bed in my bed." Since that first episode, Kelly now sleepwalks every couple of months. "I wake up in weird places, randomly. I have once woken up in the kitchen, and on the floor of the bathroom wrapped in my sheet," she says. Alon Avidan , director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Sleep Disorder Center, is a neurologist who studies sleepwalking. "We do not understand the reason why people sleepwalk," he says. But at the basic level, sleepwalking is the brain's inability to fully wake up. "When you place electrodes on the sleeping brain, what you will see is a person going into very slow [brain wave] sleep," he says. Slow brain waves are characteristic of a state called non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. It's the first stage of sleep as a person drifts off, and Avidan says this is whenLack Of Sleep, Genes Can Get Sleepwalkers Up And Abouthttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/lack-sleep-genes-can-get-sleepwalkers-and-about
29155 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 27 Aug 2012 07:23:00 +0000Lack Of Sleep, Genes Can Get Sleepwalkers Up And AboutMichelle TrudeauSix years ago, we told you about a woman, identified as A.J., who could remember the details of nearly every day of her life. At the time, researchers thought she was unique. But since then, a handful of such individuals have been identified. And now, researchers are trying to understand how their extraordinary memories work. Bob Petrella, 62, of Los Angeles had to go through a lot of memory testing to qualify as someone with superior autobiographical memory. First, there were lots of questions about news events from the past several decades, like the O.J. Simpson car chase. Petrella scored 55 percent correct on the news events, according to a paper published in July in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory . (Most people get 15 percent.) Then he was quizzed about his own life. "They asked, 'What day of the week was Jan. 1, 1984?' — which was a Sunday," Petrella recalls. "And the Steelers, my favorite team, lost to the Raiders that day, 38-10." Petrella is one of 11Why Can Some People Recall Every Day Of Their Lives? Brain Scans Offer Clueshttp://wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/why-can-some-people-recall-every-day-their-lives-brain-scans-offer-clues
28805 as http://wyomingpublicmedia.orgMon, 20 Aug 2012 07:23:00 +0000Why Can Some People Recall Every Day Of Their Lives? Brain Scans Offer Clues